GSK Invests $300M in 23andMe as Companies Collaborate on Drug Development | Bio Tech

‘Beginning to Discuss the Details’

Answering a GEN question during the conference call, Richard Scheller, Ph.D., 23andMe’s CSO and head of therapeutics, said his company and GSK have yet to nail down the early-stage programs.

“We’re just beginning to discuss the details around those potential collaborations,” Dr. Scheller said. “We have a number of drug discovery projects that we’ve started in the areas of autoimmune, cancer immunotherapy, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, liver disease, and so on.”

Dr. Scheller added that the company has not publicly disclosed its therapeutic targets for those programs. “Just today, we are disclosing them to GSK to begin the discussions of which might enter into a collaboration.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing that data,” Dr. Barron added.

Since then, Dr. Scheller said, the group has launched several drug discovery programs and built out 23andMe’s capabilities for finding drug targets.

“We have a lot of information about immune phenotypes and immune dysregulated diseases, including psoriasis, osteoarthritis, and way, way too many to even comment on. We also gain insights into the immune system from asking questions like, ‘How do you respond to poison oak or a mosquito bite?’ and so on,” Dr. Scheller said.

“One of the most interesting sets of observations that we’ve made has to do with potential cancer immunotherapy targets, when we find a certain group of patients have an increase in autoimmunity and a decrease in certain types of cancer, suggesting that these variants are in genes that may be good targets for cancer immunotherapy,” he added. “We have a vast amount of information on human variants and the response of the human immune system to these variants, and we look forward to working with GSK to exploit this data.”